


proper care of the dead

by mayyouwalk



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Kinda, M/M, Missing Scene, Pre-Slash, i guess??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-14 00:32:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14124264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayyouwalk/pseuds/mayyouwalk
Summary: Liam wonders if it’s harder to sleep when you’ve been technically dead for a while.





	proper care of the dead

**Author's Note:**

> you know when you have 70 WIPs and something unrelated just hits you hard out of left field and plunks into your brain at 7am demanding to be written? yeah. bit of a nothing missing scene from after 6x07.

\----

None of them are sure what to do with the dead ghost rider. Certainly, none of them want to touch it, but then Hayden speaks up and says she thinks they should bury it.

“Why?” Mason asks. He’s still wild-eyed over Corey, twitchy and angry and upset and Liam wants to press a hand to his shoulder but he’s just so tired himself. He doesn’t know how to muster up the compassion.

“Lightning dies when it strikes the ground, right?” Hayden says, she jerks her chin at the corpse. “What if his friends come back and try to, like, re-animate him or something?”

“Makes sense,” Scott says. _Does it?_ Liam wants to ask, out of a desire to be contrary more than any real interest. He doesn’t want to be an ass though, and he guesses it makes as much sense as anything else in their fucking lives these days, anyway. “Help me lift him?”

He goes, but Scott stops him. “Hayden and I can handle it. Liam, get Theo. Chain him up again so we can leave once we’re done with this.”

Liam looks over to where Theo is slumped, in the same spot Hayden left him after dragging him up and demanding to know what the hell had happened. He’s staring at the ground, a strange, blank look on his face. He still has blood smeared from the corner of his mouth to his cheekbone. While Scott and Hayden carry the body out, Mason jogs to the car to get shovels.

The bag with the manacles and chains is in the corner, where Liam had ditched it after unchaining Theo. He doesn’t see the point of them, really. Theo could probably break them if he wanted to, not that he looks like he’d put up a fight against anything right now. When Scott came down the stairs with them just as they were about to leave the house earlier. Liam was skeptical.

“Are those really necessary?” Liam had asked, ignoring Theo’s whine of “ _seriously?”_ from behind him. “Why do you even have those?”

Scott had frowned.

“You know, I don’t remember?” he said. “I just knew they were at the back of my closet.”

If they weren’t dealing with some kind of memory-stealing monster that had probably erased a reasonable explanation from Scott’s mind, Liam would see his alpha in a whole new, disturbingly kinky, light.

The room is quiet once the sounds of Scott and Hayden shuffling out the ghost rider’s body have faded. Liam can hear Theo’s breathing now, fast and labored. As he approaches him with the chains, he has a moment to wonder if Theo’s more hurt than they thought before Theo’s hand shoots out, snatching Liam’s wrist.

“Don’t send me back,” Theo croaks. Liam takes an involuntary step backward; the grip on his wrist tightens.

Liam looks at Theo’s face and it’s just—Liam has never seen such sheer, unrestrained terror before. He looks more wild than he did when he crawled out of the ground, chest heaving, eyes flickering between gold and hazel. And Liam can’t help it, because he wonders for a moment if it’s an act, if Theo is just _that_ good, because maybe he is.

But his grip is starting to crush Liam’s wrist, bone grinding on bone, and Liam knows Theo can keep his heartbeat steady, but he doesn’t know how Theo’s managing to make it as rabbit-quick as it’s going now.

“ _Please_ ,” Theo says, voice breaking, and Liam looks up from his chest, meets his eyes. “Please don’t send me back.”

“Don’t give me a reason to,” Liam says quietly, blinking. Theo looks at him for another long, searching moment, then lets Liam pull his hand back. He slumps back against the wall and looks down again, holding his wrists out for Liam to shackle, and he doesn’t say another word until they’re in the car.

\--

“What are you even going to tell your parents?” Theo asks, when they’ve snuck into Liam’s house, crept up the stairs and down the darkened hallway to Liam’s room.

“Nothing.” Liam shrugs. “David’s working the night shift and my mom sleeps like—”  _the dead_ “—uh, she’s a really heavy sleeper. They just think my lacrosse practices run really late.”

“No, I mean—” Theo drums his fingers on Liam’s desk. Liam turns away, going to his closet; there should be a sleeping bag tucked away somewhere, from a botched camping attempt with Mason and his family one summer. Liam hated it so much he made his parents swear to never take him.  “How are you going to explain me being here, in the morning?”

“Oh.” Liam hadn’t actually thought about that. He’s been struck a lot, in the past day, about just how much he hasn’t thought about regarding Theo and the decision to bring him back to life. It had seemed so logical at the time: he wanted to catch a ghost rider, he’d needed something to control the lightning, he knew Theo could handle electricity. It wasn’t so much a plan as just the rational follow-through, he’d thought.

Now, staring at Theo, standing in the corner of his room, looking lost and like he’s trying to make himself smaller, hell having stripped away all his bonus powers, Liam wonders again if he’s made a mistake.

“Let me guess,” Theo says, now trailing his fingers across Liam’s windowsill. “There wasn't a plan for that part of the plan, either?”

Liam rolls his eyes. Strangely, he’s almost relieved at Theo’s snark. It feels like firmer ground, more familiar than the image he can’t get out of his head: Theo in that shack, gripping his wrist, frantic, pleading.

He tosses the sleeping bag at Theo’s chest. “The plan is you sleep here tonight and in the morning I tell my parents you’re a friend from school.”

Theo’s hands clench in the soft material; he scoffs but doesn’t say another word, just lays the sleeping bag out between Liam’s bed and the window. Liam strips off his shirt, digging in his dresser for a clean one. He hesitates a moment before reaching for the button on his jeans, but, fuck it, he’s used to changing in a locker room of about twenty guys. There’s no reason this should give him pause, and if he refuses to look at Theo while he’s only in his boxers that’s just because he’s trying to avoid Theo making any stupid comments.

He tugs on a pair of basketball shorts before turning around. Theo’s still standing there, just staring out the window now, dragging his knuckles back and forth across his breastbone. When he sees Liam staring he drops his arm immediately, hand curling into a tight fist at his side. His cheek is still stained red from the blood too hastily washed off. Liam looks at his torn shirt and dirty jeans and sighs, digging out another, larger t-shirt and a pair of old sweatpants.

“Here,” he says, throwing those to Theo too. “The pants might be a little short on you, but at least they’re clean.

Theo blinks down at the clothes in his hands and nods slowly. He shrugs out of his sweatshirt, turns his back to Liam and pulls his shirt over his head one-handed. There are five, faded puncture marks on his lower back, dried blood trailing from them and disappearing in the waistband of his jeans. Claw marks, dug deep, claws that had probably curled around Theo’s spine, a wound that would probably take days to heal, maybe longer for a chimera.

Liam realizes he’s staring when Theo starts to push his jeans down as well and Liam gets a glimpse of tight black boxers before he looks away, face hot, hoping Theo can’t hear the staccato beat of his heart ramming his ribcage. He counts to fifty before he looks back.

“I have to chain you up,” Liam says, wondering why it sounds like he’s apologizing. Theo just nods at him, sitting down on top of the sleeping bag and holding out his wrists again. His face is doing that terrifying blank thing again, eyes a little too wide, faraway like he’s not actually in this room with Liam anymore.

Liam digs in the bag he’d thrown on his desk and hefts the chains, wincing at how loud they are shifting against each other in the quiet room. He could maybe just chain one wrist, to the radiator. Or, would the leg of his desk hold him? Maybe his bed, instead, the bars of the headboard look sturdy but was the chain long enough to reach all the way to the floor, and if he does that then every time Theo shifts they’re going to clank and Liam is never going to be able to sleep, and—

He looks at Theo and drops the chains. “Look just—don’t run, ok? And don’t maul me in my sleep.”

If he was hoping for a laugh, or a smart-ass comment, or maybe even a thanks, he doesn’t get it. Theo just drops his arms and crawls into the sleeping bag, rolling so that his back is to Liam. Liam sighs, climbing into bed and laying on his back, on arm folded behind his head. He shifts, trying to get comfortable. For all that he’s exhausted, he finds himself laying there, listening to the clock in the hall ticking away, thinking about how much school is going to suck tomorrow and if he can sneak in a nap before lacrosse practice, and what they’re going to do with Theo during the day.

And suddenly he can’t hear the clock in the hall anymore, all he can hear is a pounding, distressed heartbeat that isn’t his own.

“Theo?” Liam says softly into the darkness. He hears Theo’s sharp inhale of breath, the sound of the sleeping bag rustling. “You ok?”

“Fine,” Theo breathes. Liam can practically feel him trying to calm down his heart rate, smell the fear in the air. “I’m fine.”

“Your heart is really loud.”

“I’m—” Theo chokes on the word, and Liam glances over the edge of the bed to see Theo rolled onto his back, scrubbing his face with both hands. His eyes look red and Liam’s own heart lurches at the sight before he can stop it. Theo smells scared, and like shame, and like that same sharp tang of grief Liam’s smelled on him once before. Liam wonders if it’s harder to sleep when you’ve been technically dead for a while. He wonders what Theo’s scared of, if he has nightmares or if he thinks he won’t wake up again. Either way, Liam can’t really blame him.

“Do you still play Halo?” he asks.

There’s a long pause.

“What?” Theo says. Liam sits up and looks down at him, sheets pooling in this lap. Theo’s propped up on his elbows, looking at Liam like Liam’s lost his mind.

“Halo,” Liam says again, glad the only light in the room is a faint moonlight so Theo can’t see how red his face is. “I remember seeing you play it when—”  _when Stiles thought you were an imposter and we stalked you for hours and what do you know, turns he was right_ “—I remember seeing you play it before. I’ve got 3.”

“That’s…” Theo trails off. Liam waits. Theo clears his throat.

“That’s a really old one,” he finally says, and Liam lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“Yeah, Mason has 4 and Guardians,” Liam says. “I’m probably gonna buy 6 whenever it comes out.”

“Ok,” Theo says, still staring at him warily.

“So, do you want to play?”

“What, now?” Theo asks, sitting up properly. “It’s like, 3am.”

It’s not a no. Liam shrugs, tossing off the covers and padding over to set up his Xbox. “I’ll keep the sound off. As long as we’re not too loud, my mom shouldn’t wake up.”

Theo’s silent behind him, but when Liam turns around he’s sitting on the floor with his back to Liam’s bed, knees propped up in front of him.

“You got another controller?” Theo asks, nodding at the one in Liam’s hands. Liam gives him a small grin, handing it over and grabbing a second one from behind his TV, settling down next to Theo.

They play until the moonlight fades and the sky starts growing lighter outside. Theo’s...alarmingly good at it for someone who probably only learned to play so he could pretend to be a normal teenage boy. Liam resigns himself to having his ass kicked for the duration, muttering curses under his breath every time Theo beats him. Theo starts chuckling softly every time he does, and Liam flushes warm at the sound. They wind up pressed together from shoulder to hip as they play, leaning more heavily on the bed as the hours drag on, until Liam closes his eyes during one of the loading screens and finds he doesn’t want to open them again.

He wakes up an hour later to a knock on his door, his mom calling him down for breakfast. His controller is still in his lap, his neck stiff and his face mashed against Theo’s shoulder. Theo’s got his arms folded over his chest and his head tipped back against the mattress, heartbeat slow and steady, but when Liam straightens up he sees that he’s awake, blinking down at Liam, face impassive. The bags under his eyes don’t look much better than they did last night.

They get up. They don’t talk about it.

**Author's Note:**

> late disclaimer, i don't play halo.


End file.
